walking sticks « Letters from Grenada

walking sticks

One of my uncles is celebrity entymologist. He lives in Hawaii and once upon a time he was crawling on his belly in the rainforest and discovered a carnivorous fly. All the other insect nerds got very excited, SO excited in fact that that fly was named after him and then he and his fly were the subject of National Geographic special.

That was more than thirty years ago now. He still lives in Hawaii and he still does stuff with bugs. (“Stuff with bugs” being the technical term.) He’s the funny uncle. He’s super-smart but also a total manboy and my cousins and I joke that it’s a family rite of passage to go hiking with Uncle Steve and come face-to-face with our mortality. It has happened to all of us. He gets lost. He doesn’t bring enough water. He misses the ferry off the uninhabited island and has to be rescued by helicopter. My personal contribution to the almost-get-killed-by-Uncle-Steve canon is the time when I was 16 and visited him in Hawaii and found myself being forced to hike up a live volcano. It was so hot that the ocean was evaporating which rendered the air full of salty steam. I have never been so thirsty in my entire life.

There are too many stories I could tell about him, like the time he came to visit us in New York while I was in high school and he turned our kitchen into a persimmon jelly farm. Or the time twenty years later when he came to visit us in Grenada and started trying to recruit local moth hunters and also got my mom involved in a project funded by the Defense Department that had something to do with natural insect radar and the caves of Afghanistan.

Steve’s on my mind right now because I was just looking through my archive and discovered this photo that he took. I’m not particularly fond of insects but this one in particular freaks me out because you watch stuff like A Bug’s Life so you KNOW that walking sticks exist but to see one in real life and realize that it really does look like a stick? And that potentially you could get one in your hair and mistake it for part of an innocent tree? Gah.

There are two other creepy things about this photo. First, that it was taken on my kitchen table. And second… There are actually two walking sticks. Two! Maybe it’s just me but I did not immediately notice the second, smaller one. I don’t even know what they are doing but I can only assume it’s some kind of nookie and I am never letting that man use my camera again.